MiniZinc is a platform for developing Constraint Programming models and solving discrete optimization problems. In this post, we describe the MiniZinc installation on Debian Stretch. Despite the targeted operating system, steps presented below should be easily portable to other Linux distributions.

Keeping a project build in a manageable time range is an important prerequisite for an efficient software development workflow. The more complex projects are the more time, automation effort and tools required to develop and maintain an efficient build pipeline. Regardless of a scale and type of a project the core principle of avoiding unnecessary work is worth applying.

This tutorial presents an approach to simplify a build process by creating a package of a third-party software component upfront and hosting it in an external package repository. It is an alternative to building a component from sources on a development or continuous integration machine.

Managing multiple machines without automation and tool support could be an annoying duty for a creative person. There are many ways to better spend time than to execute the same command on each machine. Nowadays, a professional system administrator should be able to build and manage networks of thousands computers. Even if a system administration is not your full-time job and the cluster to manage is two orders of magnitude smaller it is still worth to use your time effectively. Why not invest some time upfront and master a few key skills to better manage Linux machines in the future?

Linux operating system family has not yet came with a robust solution to automatically detect missing drivers and install relevant firmware in the background. Fortune favours the bold, so don’t be discouraged by the lack of this feature. This post aims to provide you with general purpose instructions how to find packages with drivers that are required by your hardware assuming firmware is available for your Linux distribution.

This article is a the collection of Linux customizations and productivity tricks. Instead of looking for relevant commands in my memory and in the internet every time I need them I decided to organize them here. I hope you will find them useful too.

Torque is an open-source cluster management system deployed in many supercomputing facilities around the world. A quick search in Google returns me a list of Torque user guides from servers in USA, UK, India and Germany on the first page. Despite wide Torque adoption and extensive Administrator Guide I found it difficult to set up a managed cluster on a dozen of computing nodes with no prior experience. Sources of my problems were no official support for Ubuntu by Adaptive Computing, the company who maintains Torque, and lack of examples for Ubuntu in the Administrator Guide. The goal for this article is to fill this gap by providing detailed setup instructions for configuration of a Torque cluster with two computing nodes running Ubuntu Trusty Tahr 14.04 LTS.

Torque job scripts are developed in a Unix shell or a scripting language with a shell interpreter. Common examples of both approaches are Bash and Python respectively. This post will explain how to submit a Torque job to the batch server and specify extra requirements that should be satisfied by the runtime environment selected to run the job.

This post provides general overview of tools for querying, filtering, cancelling and tracing of Torque jobs.